A Bone To Pick

As the title of this post suggests, I have a bone to pick and it's with the month of February. I have issues with this month. It's nothing personal per se, I mean the month has never done anything to me directly and honestly one day I may find some redeeming qualities in February, more on that later, but right now I have some problems. It's not a long list, it's just two things, but they're enough to provoke me to finally sit down and get it off my chest with the hopes of being able to move forward with the month.

My first beef is the smaller of the two beefs. It's like a cow-sized complaint vs, oh I don't know, a bull-sized complaint if we want to keep with the whole beef metaphor. Anyway the first issue I have is with the weird length of the month. If we have all these months with 31 days why not just take a couple of the extra days from those months, give them to
February and bingo bango bongo, we have more 30 day months. Why not bring a little uniformity to the calendar? Yes, yes I know, we have leap year to deal with but on those years February would just be 31 days long. Not a big deal really, that's no different than a number of other months on the calendar.

Side note: I do understand the history of how the month was created by the Romans a long, long time ago and what brought about the creation of February, and January for that matter, and blah, blah, blah. But, if I wanted to get all historical/technical it would really ruin what I'm going for here in this post so we'll just move forward leaving the reality of  the creation of the modern-day calendar behind. Plus I have a hard enough time coming up with things to write about, as you can tell from the length of time between posts, so let's not get all historical now. If you want a brief history lesson you can go here

So that's the cow. Now here's the bull. This is my main issue with this month. It's the name...February. That's a terrible name. It's almost impossible to say without sounding completely ridiculous. FEB-roo-air-ee. You can't say it in the normal flow of conversation without having to slow way down on that B to R combo that's smack in the middle of the word. Go ahead and try to say the line, "I can't wait for the month of February to be over." You see!?! You sound totally fine and then it's like you go into slo-mo for half a second right in the middle of the word. I bet if you looked in the mirror while saying it your mouth would even look like it's in slo-mo. FEB (slo-mo starts) Rrrooooo (slo-mo ends) air-ee. It's terrible I tell you.

It's so bad that most of us don't even say it correctly. We end up ignoring the spelling completely and go with FEB-you-air-ee. It's much easier to say and you don't go into a stop-motion animation moment in mid sentence. The problem with that is that it isn't right. It's like a Brett Favre thing going on there where you just ignore reality and say it the easiest way possible. It's spelled "fahv-ruh" not "farve"!! But that's for another time.

So we're left with a choice. Say it correctly and look like you have some sort of weird facial and verbal tick or say it wrong and at least be able to keep talking normal. What kind of choice is that? You either say it correctly and sound dumb, or say it the easy way and appear dumb because you are mispronouncing a word. And that, is my main issue with this blasted month. If forces you to be dumb! One way or the other it's going to get you and there's not much you can do about it. February wins, it wins every time. That gets me thinking...perhaps it's a good thing this silly month is shorter than all others. It's a less time we have to worry about trying to say the ridiculous word!

Now, I did mention that there may be some redeeming quality for the month at some point. In Phoenix it happens to be the month that you begin planting gardens. I just finished planting my very first vegetable garden this month so if all goes well and I actually harvest something out of it then I might cut February some slack. Until then however, we're not on speaking terms. I will avoid saying it's name whenever possible and it can avoid saying mine.